Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav­els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies such as G4S, Serco, and Halliburton cash in on or­ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.

Disaster has become big business. Talking to immigrants stuck in limbo in Britain or visiting immigration centers in America, Loewenstein maps the secret networks formed to help cor­porations bleed what profits they can from economic crisis. He debates with Western contractors in Afghanistan, meets the locals in post-earthquake Haiti, and in Greece finds a country at the mercy of vulture profiteers. In Papua New Guinea, he sees a local commu­nity forced to rebel against predatory resource companies and NGOs.

What emerges through Loewenstein’s re­porting is a dark history of multinational corpo­rations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valu­able commodity. Disaster Capitalism is published by Verso in 2015 and in paperback in January 2017.

Vulture capitalism has seen the corporation become more powerful than the state, and yet its work is often done by stealth, supported by political and media elites. The result is privatised wars and outsourced detention centres, mining companies pillaging precious land in developing countries and struggling nations invaded by NGOs and the corporate dollar.
Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea and across Australia to witness the reality of this largely hidden world of privatised detention centres, outsourced aid, destructive resource wars and militarized private security. Who is involved and why? Can it be stopped? What are the alternatives in a globalised world? Profits of Doom, published in 2013 and released in an updated edition in 2014, challenges the fundamentals of our unsustainable way of life and the money-making imperatives driving it. It is released in an updated edition in 2014.

Four Australian thinkers come together to ask and answer the big questions, such as: What is the nature of the universe? Doesn't religion cause most of the conflict in the world? And Where do we find hope?
We are introduced to different belief systems – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – and to the argument that atheism, like organised religion, has its own compelling logic. And we gain insight into the life events that led each author to their current position.
Jane Caro flirted briefly with spiritual belief, inspired by 19th century literary heroines such as Elizabeth Gaskell and the Bronte sisters. Antony Loewenstein is proudly culturally, yet unconventionally, Jewish. Simon Smart is firmly and resolutely a Christian, but one who has had some of his most profound spiritual moments while surfing. Rachel Woodlock grew up in the alternative embrace of Baha'i belief but became entranced by its older parent religion, Islam.
Provocative, informative and passionately argued, For God's Sake, published in 2013, encourages us to accept religious differences, but to also challenge more vigorously the beliefs that create discord.

After Zionism, published in 2012 and 2013 with co-editor Ahmed Moor, brings together some of the world s leading thinkers on the Middle East question to dissect the century-long conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, and to explore possible forms of a one-state solution.
Time has run out for the two-state solution because of the unending and permanent Jewish colonization of Palestinian land. Although deep mistrust exists on both sides of the conflict, growing numbers of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Arabs are working together to forge a different, unified future. Progressive and realist ideas are at last gaining a foothold in the discourse, while those influenced by the colonial era have been discredited or abandoned. Whatever the political solution may be, Palestinian and Israeli lives are intertwined, enmeshed, irrevocably.
This daring and timely collection includes essays by Omar Barghouti, Jonathan Cook, Joseph Dana, Jeremiah Haber, Jeff Halper, Ghada Karmi, Antony Loewenstein, Saree Makdisi, John Mearsheimer, Ahmed Moor, Ilan Pappe, Sara Roy and Phil Weiss.

The 2008 financial crisis opened the door for a bold, progressive social movement. But despite widespread revulsion at economic inequity and political opportunism, after the crash very little has changed.
Has the Left failed? What agenda should progressives pursue? And what alternatives do they dare to imagine?
Left Turn, published by Melbourne University Press in 2012 and co-edited with Jeff Sparrow, is aimed at the many Australians disillusioned with the political process. It includes passionate and challenging contributions by a diverse range of writers, thinkers and politicians, from Larissa Berendht and Christos Tsiolkas to Guy Rundle and Lee Rhiannon. These essays offer perspectives largely excluded from the mainstream. They offer possibilities for resistance and for a renewed struggle for change.

The Blogging Revolution, released by Melbourne University Press in 2008, is a colourful and revelatory account of bloggers around the globe why live and write under repressive regimes - many of them risking their lives in doing so.
Antony Loewenstein's travels take him to private parties in Iran and Egypt, internet cafes in Saudi Arabia and Damascus, to the homes of Cuban dissidents and into newspaper offices in Beijing, where he discovers the ways in which the internet is threatening the ruld of governments.
Through first-hand investigations, he reveals the complicity of Western multinationals in assisting the restriction of information in these countries and how bloggers are leading the charge for change.
The blogging revolution is a superb examination about the nature of repression in the twenty-first century and the power of brave individuals to overcome it.
It was released in an updated edition in 2011, post the Arab revolutions, and an updated Indian print version in 2011.

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Robert Fisk examines the institutional use of torture by American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay:

“With an insurgency growing ever more vicious and uncontrollable, the emptiness of Mr Bush’s silly boast is plain [‘Mission Accomplished]. The real mission, it seems, was to institutionalise the cruelty of Western armies, staining us forever with the depravity of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram – not to mention the secret prisons which even the Red Cross cannot visit and wherein who knows what vileness is conducted. What, I wonder, is our next ‘mission’?”

His investigative journalism reveals that any chance of democracy “flowering” in Iraq is neutered by the “trail of prisons that now lies across Iraq…a shameful symbol not only of our cruelty but of our failure to create the circumstances in which a new Iraq might take shape.” Fisk also examines other fields in the “War on Terror”: “I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram [in Afghanistan] – by Americans, not by Afghans.”

With dozens of allegations, few arrests and little accountability for the top military and political brass in America, Australia or Britain, our establishment press prefers to offer this propaganda (courtesy of Murdoch’s Australian). Uncomfortable truths are airbrushed, like obedient generals in a Third World dictatorship:

“Does anybody, apart from Islamist ideologues in the Middle East and Left ideologues in the West, seriously believe the coalition troops are on some kind of imperialist adventure in Iraq? The 8 million Iraqis who turned out to vote in January did not think they were participating in some kind of empty charade, or they would surely not have braved the terrorists’ threats and bombs. The terrorists want our troops out for the simple reason that a progressive and prosperous Iraq will show up the lie in their claim that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Iraq is not about a clash of civilisations but about defeating those who dream of bringing about such a clash.”

Ant – I don't spose you happened to see Insight on SBS a month or so ago concerning the use of torture etc… how much is too much, should it be done, etc. Very interesting stuff. I've blogged often on the dynamics of conflict, hostages, etc… and it never ceases to amaze how much the public perceptions are shaped by the media. A favourite example of mine is Fallujah late last year, where prisoners were shot in front of the camera, and the public kicked up a stink. I'm not saying I support the killing of prisoners – but imagine the countless thousands of other soldiers shot that the public doesn't know about because a camera isn't there…

Antony Loewenstein

Nope, didn't see Insight (kinda boring show these days, isn't it?) Torture is torture. Full stop. Watching so-called experts justifying these acts shows their true colours. If Western media actually reported the behaviour of the "Coalition" in Iraq, and much of it is shocking, I reckon public support would dive.

Savvas Tzionis

"Mission accomplished" referred to the final 'victory' of conservatism over liberalism, not to victory over Saddam.

Poopoo

If Bob Fisk is continuing in the belief that 8 million Iraquis voted, I have this bridge I'd like him to inspect.Seems he's lost the plot, and though I'm not one to take advantage…..